Yep, I’ll grant you these puns are harding up, and they will fill more of your brain and pierce your sensibilities. But this webcomic is taylor-made for this kind of thing. Damn you Willis-on! I thought you were from Columbus, not Cleveland.

Something most people don’t discuss is that the Japanese killed roughly 22 million Chinese civilians, which represented about half of the total civilian casualties in the war and far more than the holocaust. Systematic rape and mutilation were common.

Blowing up civilian cities isn’t the right approach to a solution, but a quarter of a million dead pales in comparison to what the Japanese did to the Chinese.

At that point, an invasion of Japan was pretty much ruled out. Dropping the bomb on Japan was mostly about impressing the Soviets. Let’s not forget that it was mostly the USSR declaration of war on Japan, not the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that clinched the Japanese surrender.

Japan was on the verge of surrender? Like Saipan and everywhere else? You are kidding yourself.
“There are arguments suggesting…”, and there is also reality.
Russia waited until the last minute to get some cool new territory. If they had remained neutral, they would not have kept the Kuriles and divided Korea.

It also had a lot to do with worries about the Soviets demanding more at the peace table if they helped with the invasion of Japan. They were already going to take half of Europe, Truman and Churchill didn’t want them to get a slice of Japan as well.

I know fuck all about this myself, but my grandfather always said that the statistics the US produced at the time that they were considering the invasion of Japan showed that it would be far more costly to both sides than what actually happened, and he was one of the officers who actually planned that invasion that never happened. Of course there was only so much he could tell us given that he was still sworn to secrecy on a lot of things.

This is something a lot of people’s grandfathers were told and convinced themselves to believe because the alternative is acknowledging that your country has committed a war crime and that you have directly benefitted off of the horrible death, pain, and suffering of countless people.

How did the US directly benefit? The average US citizen got nothing out of it beyond war ending. China directly benefited – Japan stopped wholesale slaughter of Chinese civilians in numbers that make the nukes seem trivial – at the casualty rates we got from those two nukes it would have taken roughly 150 to match the number of civilians the Japanese killed. 150 nukes. Think about that.

Kevin, aside from the fact that we weren’t at war anymore, which is a direct benefit, the United States was in a position of considerable power after WWII because of a number of factors, including our nuclear capabilities. Our role in the ware had gained us considerable clout with our allies, our demonstration of nuclear power made us the primary military power in the world, and the fact that we had weathered the war with relatively few casualties gave us a strong position in the aftermath. Also, we kinda rebuilt Japan’s infrastructure and strongly influenced their post-war development, which might not have been so easy if we hadn’t ended the war before russia got involved.

There’s are reasons I’m immigrating to Canada, that “overwhelming popular support” is one of them. A minor one, but a reason nonetheless. I will at least say I do prefer truthful accurateness, though, so thank you for either shedding the light on not being able to trust even graduates of those levels to have logical thought process, or to question how the hell that happened.

Canada, eh? Good luck with that. I hope you don’t have any minor medical conditions or you could be barred from entering the country as a “burden to the healthcare state”. And the current government isn’t exactly liberal. Plus, the US isn’t the only country with a bad history with their native population.

Indeed. And for what it’s worth the most intelligent President the USA has had in a good number of decades was Clinton, who was an actual Rhodes Scholar, and he’s remembered soooo fondly. High intelligence doesn’t automatically make you right for any job.

Ohhhh my friend. You have never asked a “Southerner” what that war was about. Go and do it. Trust me. It’s an education on how the education system has failed people. “States rights” comes up a lot, and not the fact that the states in question were upset they couldn’t hold people as slaves any more. It’s slightly insane.

I mean, that’s what happens when literally your entire economy is based on the systematic oppression of another group of people.

Without slaves to pick cotton, the entire Southern economy would collapse. Even after slavery was abolished, the the South clung to its claim the states’ rights argument, using it as justification for Jim Crow laws. Again the purpose of these laws was to subjugate African Americans so land owners could continue to use them as a source of cheap labor.

Yes to all of these things. I was frankly amazed at the hoops my teachers jumped through to make the Civil War about “Northern aggression” and not the fact they were treating people like property. (Not that the North was THAT much better, but at least people were free) Sharecroppers/Jim Crow was just the new boss, exactly like the old boss, only now you get something sort of like wages.

I myself have always heard it with slavery itself put on a back burner, with it more being about whether or not a new state gets to choose their laws regarding slavery(the entire issue being bundled into the two words, states’ rights).

Of course, most of my education has been in Arkansas and Texas. With Texas writing most of the textbooks for the South, and their whole viewpoint of it… You can clearly see why it was taught that way.

Elsewhere in this discussion is linked a copy of the CSA Constitution. Interestingly, that constitution specifically institutionalized slavery in every state and territory in the Confederacy – there was none of this nonsense about some state being allowed to decide not to own slaves.

I grew up in Texas, and I learned that the North sought abolition and wanted the union to be whole again and the Southerners were defending their way of life. No antagonizing the North. But I don’t know how it is in, say, Alabama.

Saying it was about ending slavery is an awfully overly idealistic view of the North, though. I can see taking a similar tack on “states rights” not as an exoneration of the South, but more a cynical view of the North. I had the sense that the federal government, and Lincoln in particular, were most concerned with preventing any state from seceding and punishing those that did.

From a letter Lincoln wrote at the time: “If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Perhaps he didn’t fully believe that, but the fact that he made public views such as that seems to indicate that the reasoning wasn’t always clear cut in the public’s mind.

My read on that is that, as president, he considered his job to be, well, being president. And one of the great signs of a failed president is when the country dissolves out from under them. Civil war is bad for the country as a whole.

But think about it. He was born over two hundred years ago, and died over ten years before the first audible recording of a human voice was made. And yet, I have a really solid idea of what he sounded like; and the various portrayals of him sound consistent.

Which I figure means one of two things: Either somewhere along the line, probably in the early history of talkie cinema, there was a defining portrayal that was seen (and more importantly heard) by enough people that it firmly established what he sounded like, sort of the way we base what pirates, arr, sound like on the portrayal of Long John Silver from Disney’s “Treasure Island,” or–and the possibility of this is really, really cool–enough people actually heard his speeches back in the day that imitators were able to copy him well enough that the imitation was recognizable by the people who had heard him first-hand, and that they in turn were copied by other performers, right up to the present day; and that means that, when I read that quote, I am hearing in my head the actual sound of a man’s voice whose voice was never actually recorded, transmitted by roughly a century and a half or more of human beings, passing on the sound of his voice, imitation by imitation, over something like seven generations.

Which is a pretty deep and kinda freaky thing to realize at three in the morning while reading the comments for a webcomic.

Derek, that’s an often-quoted section of Lincoln’s writing, but very few people go on to quote the closing bit of that same letter: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”

In other words, he did consider it his job to prevent secession and save the union by whatever means necessary. But to say there was no element of abolitionist thinking to his logic is glossing over things immensely. If he’d really had no opinion one way or the other on slavery, he might have taken a different tack altogether…

Yeah, Lincoln’s personal writings are that the whole “Preserve the Union without freeing slaves” thing was public copy to pro-slavery Northerners. In short, Honest Abe was a lying politician–and a much better human being for it.

I’m not saying it had nothing to do with slavery, that would be stupid. But a big problem the South had with the North was that they were supposedly taking their rights (to own slaves) away with an excess of federal power.

Well, yes, the federal government should always have the power to tell the states under them that they are not allowed to hold other human beings as property, or lynch them, or deny them the right to vote, or get married, or have children. The states agreed to that power when they joined the union initially. Just because they didn’t like the order, didn’t mean they had the right to throw a temper tantrum, especially since they were seriously in the wrong on the subject.

Nope. If you look for expansions of federal power at the expense of the states, the biggest one was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 transferring those cases from state to federal courts, and the secessionists were all for that. One of South Carolina’s official complaints was that some northern states let black people vote when the federal Supreme Court said blacks weren’t citizens (in the early republic many states, both northern and southern, had let blacks vote but by 1860 all southern and many northern states had abandoned that).

I’ve yet to find a single example of federal interference in the internal affairs of the states that secessionists were complaining about, though I’ve found several (when the federal government intervened on behalf of slaveholding interests) that secessionist supported.

In short, claiming “states’ rights” was anything more than a code phrase for protecting slavery and white supremacy is a crock of raw fertilizer.

“States’ rights”, then as now, is a dog-whistle term. They say something that sounds innocuous, even commendable, but what it means to the people who are saying it and the people they’re saying it to is something entirely different.

In the time leading up to the Civil War, what it meant was states’ – the slave states’ – right to push slavery into places where it had previously been illegal, and to use the power of the Federal government to compel free states to enforce the slave states’ laws in violation of our own.

You think actual states’ rights had anything whatsofuckingever to do with the Civil War, read the CSA’s constitution sometime. It’s very, very similar to the U.S. Constitution, with the primary differences being a) they made it explicitly unconstitutional to secede from the CSA, and b) they made it explicitly unconstitutional for any state in the CSA to ever make slavery illegal.

And in my home state, slavery has been illegal longer than the United States has existed. Article Fucking One of our constitution bans slavery; it’s literally our first law. One of the primary routes of the Underground Railroad, up what’s now US 7, ran right past my house, and hundreds of escapees were smuggled to freedom through here. The slave states so prized states’ rights that they pushed the Federal government into passing the Fugitive Slave Act, which required LEOs in the free states to capture not just people escaped from bondage but anyone that anyone claimed was an escaped slave and deliver them into slavery in the South, and that included hefty fines for anyone assisting escapees. We responded by officials refusing to cooperate – in one case, a judge demanding to see “a bill of sale from the Almighty” before he would return someone to his alleged owner – juries refusing to convict people indicted under the law, and a state law requiring our state officials to assist any escaped slaves, which pissed the slave states off so much that they threatened secession and got their pet Federal government to threaten to enforce martial law upon us.

That’s “states’ rights”, people. Slave states’ rights to make everyone else do things their way, and to throw a tantrum and start shooting unprovoked at American soldiers on American soil if it ever looks like they might stop getting their way.

States rights to own slaves, and the entire political conflict between north and south for 50 years prior was based on the same, especially in regards to the balance of the senate as new states were added…

but yeah, the confederate flag is totally about states rights, people I’ve met with confederate flags.

The senate balance of states that allowed slavery and didn’t, that is. The civil war didn’t happen overnight, it was a pressure cooker over time as new states were added to the west. The agreement that prevented a blowup for decades was the “mason-dixon line”, an imaginary line that separated slavery states from non-slavery states. For every new state north of the line, one had to be added south to maintain the balance in the senate. I can’t quite remember which state in the south eventually refused, but that’s what brought the conflict to a head.

Well, when Kansas entered as a “slave” state, more votes were cast in that election than there were registered voters in the territory. In other words, pro-slavery folk from Missouri, which was pro-slavery at the time, to commit voter fraud, since only Kansas citizens were supposed to vote. Kansas then entered into its own time of conflict known as “Bloody Kansas” while the rest of the nation was consumed by the civil war.

The Mason-Dixon Line was the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Both allowed slavery when it was drawn. Pennsylvania passed an abolition law in the 1780s.

In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 the federal government banned slavery in territories north of the Ohio River. Then the US made the Louisana Purchase and there was a big new chunk of land the Northwest Ordinance didn’t apply to. In the Missouri Compromise of 1820 congress split the new territory by banning slavery north of Missouri’s southern border, except in Missouri itself.

Then America grabbed about half of Mexico, and the fight was on again over the new territory. By then you were getting more and more people in both sections rejecting compromise and demanding ALL territories follow their model.

Note that all these arguments are about rules for territories, not states.

Which is hilarious, because everyone but them seems to realize that they would be a part of Mexico again in a hot minute. Or maybe they do realize that, and they never actually secede, and the federal gov’t never believes they really will. Like, “Go ahead. We give you a week. Tops.”

They don’t need many soldiers to return home. The Air Force and the Navy could very easily subdue Texas without any interference from the Army. And since seceding is treason, most soldiers stationed in Texas (who are usually not actually Texan) would not be willing to forsake their oath just be a part of a probably doomed independent state. The backlash on their families alone would be enough to sway them had they not made some serious promises to the federal gov’t. Not Texas.

texas doesn’t actually contribute all that many people. i’d say states like california and new york etc contribute more, easily.

sure, in every unit there’s someone from texas, but it’s typically only one or two people.

and, i’ll be honest and speak from experience. most of them were piss-poor at their soldiering job, and mostly joined up out of some notion they’d get to shoot guns all day, or joined up purely to get their GI bill and an education, as it was the only real opportunity that existed for them.

Also consider the fact that it doesn’t really matter how many soldiers decide to side with their home state should they decide to secede when all the really fun military hardware it would take to defend their fledgeling nation already belongs to the United States government, and I find it highly unlikely they’d just let Texas keep it all.

Okay, much as I love tweaking Texas and the South, what are you basing that on? Texas has a booming economy and is one of the few red states to pay in more in federal taxes than it get back. As a country it would be one of the biggest economies in the world — 14th by one count, ahead of South Korea or the Netherlands. Unusually for a US state, AIUI it mostly has its own power grid.

Frankly the notion of “economically not being able to survive” is rather dubious; independence doesn’t mean autarky or being cut off from trade. Alabama as a country could survive, it’d just be even poorer than it is now. But Texas seems a good candidate for independence not meaning huge big losses.

Texas is the only state that reserved the right to succeed when they initiallt joined the union. They were the only Southern state that was not breaking the law when they left. The question is, did they retain that right when they were reabsorbed as part of the CSA? I’ve never cared enough to look it up.

kind of sums up texas, and texans, in general. sure you have your decent folk round austin/houston, but the rest of the state regards them as wacky city folk at best, and ‘pinko hippie loving queers’ at worst.

John’s right — there’s nothing in the Joint Resolution annexing Texas allowing for it to secede from the Union. The only special right Texas got was prior approval to spin off up to four new states within its territory. And even that’s not a huge difference from other states — they can spin off new states too, but need the approval of congress to do it. Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina have all calved new states.

Not in the case of Texas, they joined the republic under the condition that they can later leave if they want to. They are the only state with the right to secede, if I remember correctly. They are also allowed to split into three smaller states.

Not true. Texas joined “on an equal footing with the existing states” (with the exception of the right to form up to four new states within its boundaries). Here’s the text of the joint resolution annexing Texas, there’s not a word in it allowing for secession.https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/annexation/march1845.html

No mention in either document of secession. The story that Texas retained a special right to secede is a myth. Or let’s be honest. It’s a lie.

I’m not saying you’re lying, by the way, Roborat, but the person who came up with this claim was, and you’re hardly the first person to be taken in by the claim. Hopefully now that you’ve had a chance to read the relevant documents you’ll be able to steer others towards a more accurate reading of history the next time you hear that old canard.

They’re a pretty delusional lot, in majority. I’m so thankful we were never stationed at Ft. Hood. That was an option at one point, and I practically strangled the husband to ensure we picked Maryland. Crazy-greedy, I can stand, but straight up crazy? No thank you.

Well, look guys, there’s a lot of idiots in my state, I’m not gonna lie. But there’s a lot of good people here too. If you aren’t familiar with Wendy Davis, have a look. Think you’ll like what you see there. Last presidential election Obama got a surprisingly large number of votes (just a bit under half, in fact). Demographics in my state are changing, and a big reason why is the fact that the Republicans have been entrenched in this state for so long they’ve gotten big, corrupt, and above all really stupid. A lot of us are just plain sick to death of it.

Yes… Texas is SOOOOO crazy that we’re the #1 job creator for the millionth year running (hyperbole). Maryland, on the other hand, it a shithole. Enjoy getting stabbed or shot in lovely gun-free Baltimore! (I looked up the stats by the way, Baltimore is far FAR more dangerous than any major city in Texas)

A good thing to say against the whole “states rights” thing is to ask why most of the South complained about the lack of enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in the North (which many northern states ignored practically to the point of nullification).

Ask a really hardcore Southerner this question. Wear a raincoat for the spittle, and take a shot every time you hear the phrase “Northern aggression”, two sips for “states’ rights” and when you hear “Slavery would have ended anyway” then finish the bottle and go buy another bottle because you are going to need it to cope with what you just heard.

Better drinking game: Ask a Northerner to explain why the Constitution suddenly stopped mattering when something the North wanted came into play. Drink during the time the Yankee Jackhole is either sitting there with a dumb look on his/her face or drink while said Yankee hims & haws about how some form of Spock’s speech (The needs of the many) spills out, because Yankees don’t actually want to be free, they want to be nanny’ed.

What I usually hear– from a lot of people, including some who should really know better– is that it was over states’ rights […to decide to maintain slavery] and the “gentleman farmer” lifestyle […which doesn’t sound THAT bad until you realize it was almost entirely supported by slavery. There were a FEW non-slave-owning farmers who didn’t starve but they were soundly in the minority].

One of the joys of living in the South, albeit one of the South’s more civilized areas.

The USA was sort of a political powder keg back then, too. Slavery was just the most volatile and central of the issues dividing states, and the Bleeding Kansas revolt, that clinging to African-American Enslavement brought about, was when the keg went BOOOOM! After the Confederacy formed, it was about Keeping the Union from Dividing for the North and Clinging to their Racist Slavery-based lifestyle for the South.

Actually, you’re dead wrong. MOST farmers weren’t slave owners. There were a small number of highly populated plantations (Think of today’s modern corporations vs. small businesses as a comparison of the structure, if not the morality or lack thereof) that owned a ton of slaves. Ma and Pa farmer couldn’t afford slaves.

In 1860:2

4.5 million people of African descent lived in the United States.
Of these: 4.0 million were enslaved (89%), held by 385,000 slaveowners.

That’s out of a general population of around 9 million.

Your regular person didn’t own slaves. Out of 6 million people, about 6% were slave owners. Of course. that doesn’t include family or employees, but even so, the number doesn’t account for the vast majority of people living in the South.

Not saying it was a good thing. It was pure evil. But you should get your facts straight before posting.

some people claim it was about tariffs, or a nebulous concept of “states’ rights” that is not equivalent to slavery, or industrialization versus the plantation economy, or the culture of honor in the South clashing with the North, or the Southern aristocracy versus the North’s capitalists

i have a hard time believing any of them would’ve caused the Civil War without slavery around, because there was no issue in 1850s American politics that got everyone as pissed off as slavery. you couldn’t even talk about other issues without someone bringing up slavery in the territories, and nobody put as much effort into entrenching their own sides and attacking the other for any other issue. like, everyone would whine about tariffs and shit, but nobody was seriously willing to go to war over tariffs alone. even in 1832, when South Carolina threatened to secede over a tariff and Andrew Jackson stomped on their shit, the fear that an increasingly powerful federal government might start meddling with slavery was at the heart of South Carolina’s thinking.

usually when people want to say the Civil War was about something other than slavery, it’s because they want to separate the idea of rebelling against the federal government and making the state governments the final source of governmental authority in the United States from the idea of upholding the institution of race-based bondage of human beings.

The way I see it, the American Civil War was *basically* about slavery, but there’s a very strong reaction a lot of people have against being told eight quadrillion times that it was *only* about slavery, and that makes people overstate the case. I mean, God forbid we talk about things with any nuance and all.

There’s a difference between secession, which was largely about slavery (there were some general states’ rights issues that had been simmering for some time, but slavery was the biggest issue), and the war itself, which was much more about reuniting the country by force than it was about slavery (pre-Emancipation Proclamation, anyway). Sad to say, the majority of Northerners didn’t give a damn about slavery and were just as racist as their southern brethren.

Yep. Only so many white US citizens could accept preserving an institution of chattel bondage of human beings, but they were pretty united with opposing the idea of African Americans being allowed into “their” society back then.

Actually, most northerners *did* give a damn about slavery — that’s why the openly anti-slavery Republican Party racked up big majorities in the north. Most of them weren’t willing to force the south to give it up, but they were determined to prevent its further spread. Saying the north didn’t care about slavery was like saying the US didn’t care about Communism during the Cold War because Truman adopted a policy of containment instead of invading China.

Secondly, to summarize and shorten the many lengthly posts already made in response to your question…

As ones education increases, ones understanding of the causes of the Civil War goes through three stages.

Slavery

Actually, it was the issue of States Rights especially in the case of self-determination, exacerbated by increasingly different cultures and values systems. To be blunt, the North and South were completely different societies by the time the war happened.

All the above issues were caused by slavery (or the lack thereof in the North)

I really only learned about the Civil War in elementary school, to be honest. We focused a lot on slavery while doing so, putting on plays, singing freedom songs, etc. etc. If it was brought up during middle school, it was only very briefly (I actually got two straight years of learning about China instead, which was cool), and no one mentioned it at all in high school. Of course, I did drop out junior year…

Tariffs are sometimes brought up, because they actually were an issue at the time. The famous “Corner Stone” speech about the South’s new constitution starts out talking about tariffs.

It finishes off talking about how people aren’t all equal, because blacks are worse, and that will be the whole point of the new country. So slavery, but I’ve actually seen it claimed as proof the Civil War was all about tariffs anyway.

But tariffs were at their lowest level since the 1820s when secession started, and pro-tariff Republicans didn’t have nearly enough votes to pass a tax increase until AFTER secession and the walk-out of all the deep south senators.

“Taxes are where I want them, and you can’t raise them, but you *want* to raise them, so I’m going to leave the Union” is not a compelling reason to break up the nation, and secessionists knew it — that’s why none of the declarations of causes for secession mention tariffs even once. Slavery they mention about 80 times.

well, the north placed a lot of economic pressure on the south through massively unfair competition, denied them any real industrialization, and generally made life hell, and then on top of it, sought to take away the one thing(slavery) that made the south at all competitive from an economic standpoint.

and when the southern states finally had enough of it, the north went and invaded, and at swordpoint forced them to give in.

LOLWUT? Your answer is completely ignorant. The south actively sought and held an agrarian style and rejected industrialization in their cities. The 3/5s compromise was still in effect and was still giving the South a disproportionate amount of representation in the House. Finally, the South started the war when they fired on Fort Sumter.

I’ve got to call bullshit on Jynx too. The north didn’t deny the south industrialization. The south denied itself. Buying slaves sucked up its liquid capital, and southerners kept on bidding up the price of slaves. Some southerners like Henry Clay called for southern industrialization, but the Jeffersonian idea that cities and industrialization are fundamentally immoral and the agrarian model more virtuous won out.

The whole idea behind low tariffs (which southern leaders called for) was to favor export agriculturalists (midwestern wheat and corn, southern cotton and tobacco, New England lumber, etc) and let cheap foreign imports overwhelm domestic production (New England textiles, Pennsylvania iron, Louisiana sugar). And the anti-tariff people were WINNING. There hadn’t been a tariff hike since 1842 (signed into law by future Confederate John Tyler), and there’d been two major reductions since. The 1857 tariff was the lowest since the 1820s, so southern complaints that they were being economically persecuted when THEIR ECONOMIC POLICIES WERE IN EFFECT are, quite frankly, nonsense.

And AIUI, the Southern states have never been big on public education — even for poor whites, never mind it being illegal to teach slaves (a majority of the population in some states!) to read. Whereas MA Puritans had public schools in the 1600s. Very different approach to, uh, human capital.

South’s always been about cheap labor, from slaves to union-busting, not good labor.

It’s amazing what schools a draft-dodger can get into when their daddy has money, isn’t it? Almost insulting to all the soldiers/airmen/sailors/Marines sent to war with the hope of a GI Bill that will hopefully cover their expenses so that they can get out of the military and survive, if they don’t end up committing suicide from their PTSD.

Honestly, I’ve come to think more kindly of George than I did during his presidency. Back then I thought he was pure manipulative evil. These days I just kind of assume he’s so dumb we’re lucky he knows has to operate a toilet, and is a guy with an obsession with one-upping Daddy whether it is a good idea or not.

Well, I exaggerate, but I do think he made so SIGNIFICANT tactical errors and made bad assumptions on several occasions. He isn’t the worst president we’ve ever had, but fair to say he’s the worst in office since *I* was born. (On that topic, all you need to know is I can compare him to his dad and leave it at that).

Keep in mind the president can only make decisions based on information given to him. If national intelligence fucks up or misleads him, he might make a decision that looks like a personal failing but was based on bad information. That doesn’t apply to all of his decisions but maybe a few major ones.

If I remember right you implied you are in college a few strips ago, so I’m not about to think of you as an old geezer. If H’s presidency was while you were an infant, you are approximately my age.

There is no particular reason to think that Bush was deliberately mislead by his intelligence departments. It’s possible that everyone overestimated the fanfare and welcome the Americans would receive when they went on their imperialistic rampage, but that’s different than being deceived.

If I remember right (and to be honest I didn’t give two shits at the time) Bush was lead to believe there were WMDs in Iraq and it later turned out that was bad intel. Whether or not he was mislead or it was just a mistake, that would mean he was given bad info. Of course, it’s possible I remember wrong and he always believed there were no WMDs.

It’s not his fault America treats itself as hall monitor and tries to police the world without being asked. That’s been going on for decades, if not centuries.

Yeah, even at the time the “proofs” given for WMD were very very dubious.
Except maybe when you were asking Fox News, Republican officials or the National Intelligence people working under them.
Also, the Irak-AlQaeda link allegations were completely made-up.

There was other, conflicting intelligence that this was not the case, which the president had access too. Rather than evaluating all the available evidence, weighing their respective evidence and how reasonable they are, a stupid person chooses the option they want to hear.

America was practically isolationist until WWI, and did almost nothing internationally until after WWII, mostly because of the cold war. Decades, sure, you could argue that, centuries…not so much.

Ironically, the US is so gunshy after Iraq and Afghanistan, they frequently refuse to help when they are asked (Syria, probably Ukraine). It’s like when the backlash over Somalia kept the US from doing anything in Rwanda, and then a couple hundred thousand people were murdered with machetes over a hundred day period. They were organized by an easy-to-jam radio…

If *I* remember right, American intelligence kept telling Bush that there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq, and Bush kept firing their bosses and replacing them with new ones until they caught the hint and starting saying that yes, there probably were. And I was paying attention at the time.

He was probably genuinely misguided when thinking that taking over Saddam would be all it takes to turn Irak into a peacefull democracy. Which is still a huge fuck-up, one that plays strongly in favor of making him one of the worst presidents.
However, he was NOT genuine about the reasons given for invading Irak.

But, a Boo Cannon sounds worthless. You’d have to launch them while the enemy’s back is turned, and the cannon alone should make enough sound to make them turn around, and I don’t even need to mention their endless spooky giggling.

The tricky thing about showing how your pronounce words is that someone with a different accent might pronounce your pronouncing words differently, for example the Aussie pronunciation for weight sounds like the Yank pronunciation for white.

So glad I majored in linguistics. Not only did we use the IPA in all our phonology classes, but we got to study a theory titillatingly called “Government and Binding”. Then there were all those years spent below the poverty line before falling into one of the few blue-collar jobs still left that pay something close to a living wage. I’d do it all over again…

Seriously, if that’s your major, change to something more lucrative unless you can go into computational linguistics, which might allow you to stay housed and fed.

I majored in linguistics too! Toward the end of my time at school I realized I could double major in English by only picking up a few more classes, so I did that. People always say English is a useless degree, but it helped me get jobs more than the linguistics degree ever did (I’ve been a designer and a writer).

Toward the end of my studies, I also started asking my linguistics professors what sort of jobs I should be looking for…and none of them had an answer. The best I got out of them were recommendations to get a PhD.

I remember how in Elementary School, I was taught that the Civil War was about slavery, in High School, I was taught that it was about many issues, slavery being one of them, and in college, that it pretty much was just about slavery.

I…I can’t even read your comment. I’m too busy laughing at the fact you have Joe as your gravitar with the name Cthulhu’s Intern. It changes the meaning from something dark, to something straight from a hentai.

That’s similar to how it went for me.
Elementary: “The Civil War was about slavery.”
Middle school: “No, the Civil War was about various social, economic, and political differences.”
High school: “The Civil War was about a social issue (slavery), an economic issue (slavery), and a political issue (slavery).”

They basically taught that the states had the right to make their own laws (i.e. decide that people were property, because that held up the romantic antebullum ideal of the plantation) and were not beholden to the federal gov’t’s “oppression” (the federal gov’t saying “hey, you can’t do that any more”) because they as individual states had the right to make their own decisions. Unfortunately, the way I understand it, they chose to join the union, and that meant they were beholden to human rights passed on the federal level whether they liked it or not. They just don’t see it that way.
A lot of Southern states don’t seem to understand how much they depend on the federal government to keep them afloat, and it’s crazy. They seem to honestly believe that if they secede and establish a Confederate States of America, they’re going to be very successful and POC will be put in their place and go back to being sharecroppers/back to Mexico and the federal gov’t will so not unleash all the force of the US Navy and Air Force on their asses, before they ever even think of unleashing the Army.

The “states’ rights” thing comes up all the freaking time, too, over any issue anyone even remotely related to the federal government does anything about. Michelle Obama can’t tell my kids what to eat and that they should exercise! That’s big government!

How did they explain the souths support of things like the fugitive slave law, which would give the federal government crazy power in going into states and breaking their laws? Like, how do you explain that while going about the whole ‘states rights’ angle

Insofar as my textbooks said that the Civil War wasn’t initially fought for the purpose of abolition of slavery, but was rather about political control of the nation, my textbooks also said it “wasn’t about slavery.”

The economic and political factors that led to the war were inextricably linked to the institution of slavery, but the idea that all the northern states got together one day and said “what you are doing is morally wrong and so we will fight you to end the evil practice of slavery” is basically wishful thinking. We would like to believe that our ancestors were more cognizant of what we now believe to be self-evident moral truths.

It’s true that most northerners weren’t initially interested in imposing aboliton on the south — Lincoln talked about a containment policy, restricting slavery to the 15 slave states and waiting until they agreed to abolish it themselves — but secessionists CLAIMED northerners were every bit the fanatical abolitionists and racial egalitarians we wish they were. “Abolition hordes” was a popular southern phrase for Union soldiers even in 1861.

The Union didn’t start out fighting to destroy slavery, but the Confederacy was fighting to preserve and extend it. And in one of my favorite historical ironies, the war radicalized union soldiers so that by the end most of them really were the radical abolitionists southern propaganda had claimed they were at the start of the war.

One fear of the South was that if the number of free states started to outnumber the slaveholding states then the North would gain a majority and be able to dominate the Senate when it came issues on which it and the South disagreed. Which to be fair is probably exactly what would have happened and indeed was what a lot of Northern politicians were hoping for. On the other hand, owning human property basically contradicts every founding principal the Union was created for and the South was noticably straining to account for the hypocrisy.

The war radicalized Union soldiers in the sense that, thanks in part to Lincoln and friends, they came to see slavery as the foundation of the South’s economic and military power, which had to be destroyed if the war was going to end and the Union was to be preserved–and preserving the Union was above all else always the Union government, army, and public’s top priority. There were egalitarians aplenty in the victorious Union army, but it wasn’t, like, the overwhelming sentiment or anything. So, yeah, by the end of the war the Union public and soldiers were more or less radical abolitionists, in that they wanted to end the institution of slavery fullstop–but that was for the sake of destroying the Confederacy and preserving the Union, not for the sake of the slaves themselves.

and that’s important to remember because it kind of helps explain why race relations in this country are still kind of shit

And why did our Yankee ancestors WANT to “preserve the Union”? I think it was Lincoln’s plot so the Deep South could be messing with us in the 21st century. Imagine SC, AL, Miss, AK & them all living how they want, and the USA living how it wants without them. (VA, NC, … didn’t secede till Lincoln went after the “Deep”) Just saying.

Actually it had a lot to do with an overall vision of the country’s place in the world. The Civil War occurred only twelve years after the various failed democratic revolutions of 1848 in Europe, and in light of that, many Northerners saw the United States as the last beacon of democracy and republican values in an autocratic world. On top of that, the increasing number of homesteaders and capitalists in the North/West, combined with deep roots in the old Puritanical work ethic in New England, gave rise to the “rugged individualism” ethos in which a man’s worth was judged by his ability to work for himself, a sentiment that kind of clashed with having a bunch of slaves around to work your fields for you. Not to mention the Union Army was overwhelmingly composed of ordinary citizens who volunteered or were drafted for temporary military service, rather than professional soldiers, so the whole idea of a “citizens’ army” just reinforced notions of republicanism–i.e. the people came out to defend the Republic against treason and rebellion, which also just went to show that the US didn’t need some massive standing army like those European monarchies. To probably everyone in the Union Army, the Union represented everything that’s supposedly best about the United States.

Contrast that with the South, where slavery made possible the powerful plantation owners who controlled pretty much everything, and where an anachronistic culture of honor reigned supreme (e.g. notions of honor were behind the infamous Sumner caning incident). Not to mention the South’s steadfast opposition to measures like high tariffs, which were meant to foster the development and progress in America, and not to mention the relative lack of industrialization and manufacture in the South–and at a time when industrialization was synonymous with progress. It looks for all the world like an old-school aristocracy in the South…and there’s that aristocracy waging war against the Union, against the last bastion of democracy, against republicanism itself, and using slave labor to do it, too.

From the perspective of people at the time, to many that was a cause worth dying for. From the perspective of people today, well, it doesn’t sound all that bad either, does it?

And in another moment of irony, the Confederacy was eventually forced to free slaves and arm them to provide manpower for their dwindling army (they had of course had slaves in supporting roles in the army before that, but in 1865 they made it an official policy to recruit ex-slave soldiers). It was too little, far too late, and made absolutely no sense in the greater context of the war, but it did happen. As Colin McEvedy wrote: “The South would go down fighting, even though it was no longer clear what it was fighting for.”

As a general rule, trusting your textbooks isn’t a good idea beyond a broad outline. Presentism is a thing, yes, and determining the actual beliefs of the time (and the two thousand years preceding that time; there’s a reason Cato is a big deal) are not easy.

A different general rule is this: no war is ever fought for just one reason. This is not least because there are a lot of people involved in actually doing a war.

“Wait a minute we’re back on the race topic again, why!? After the last time why do this.”

….I’m gonna go out on a limb and say however much debate we might generate when it comes to the topic of what racism is as far a modern society goes we generally all agree that keeping another human being as property based on the color of the their skin was a pretty shit idea and it is a good thing we’ve moved on from that.

For the record — the “official” name of the 1861-1865 conflict between the USA and the CSA is “The War of the Rebellion”. Of course, the name was created and assigned by the USA (the winners) after the fact.

Had it gone the other way and the Confederacy had won (and gotten to write the history books), I’m sure it would have been known as “The War of Confederate Independence” or something like that.

7th grade history teacher, “although some claim it was fought for states rights, to not be beholden to the federal government.” They wanted to be city-states, or countries in an alliance.
10th grade history teacher, “it was about economics. They wanted to keep making money. So yes, it was partially about slavery”
12th grade history teacher, “it was about slavery.”

This is almost the exact opposite of how my education went. I started with learning the civil war was all about slavery and as I got further into high school and college teachers were saying more and more than slavery was oversimplifying everything and there were a large number of concurrent factors.

I’ve always stuck to the belief it was about slavery, cuz that’s less complicated.

According to Christian home-school texts, the Civil war was fought over a misunderstanding about a bagel. Only 3 people died, but only because they were atheists and everyone else prayed until they got better.

I really like how in this christian texbook “everyone else prayed until they got better” ends with them dying.
It’s as much fun as seing the local catholic church asking for money with the unironic catchphrase ; “Donation, it’s a tangible fact”.

For some reason, I’m now picturing PSL as something like Navi, hovering over my head, occasionally shouting at me and making a nuisance of itself, and only being remotely useful when there’s a legitimate target to lock onto.

This is why I won’t admit to being from Texas when I travel. I don’t want all those enlightened, tolerant beings to know what a racist, misogynist I am. But seriously, we do have a lot of chicken littles down here. And in my family.

The Civil War came about because of a complex chain of events, but tariffs and states’ rights were at best a side-show, an issue and a doctrine that were being deployed by pro-slavery elites in the South to justify secession. The main issue, both sides understood, was slavery. The secession declarations generally called attention to it: For example, in the second sentence of Mississippi’s: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.” link

And yes, Buchanan (a notorious “doughface” or southern sympathizer from Pennsylvania and rumored to have had been what today would be called the gay partner of a longtime Alabama senator) sat on his hands and did nothing for four months after the 1860 election as the crisis developed, so that when Lincoln was inaugurated the Confederacy was already in existence. Lincoln’s party was anti-slavery, but Lincoln had not committed to anything beyond preventing slavery’s expansion . . . he wasn’t given the chance to negotiate a compromise.

Ugh, can’t believe I’m touching this one but most people are throwing around conjecture, hearsay, and assumptions based on public education — the winners write the text books people.

First of all: I was born an hour outside of Pittsburgh and raised a Yankee. I live in the South now, but I sure as hell don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

I do, however, study a lot of history because I’m a weirdo and history nerd and because I’m probably double-majoring in it.

So here’s the deal:

Yes, a lot of old school Southernors scream states rights. Trust me, I hear it all the time.

However, they were screaming states rights long before anyone talked about freeing the slaves. The beginnings of the civil war go clear back, arguably, to the 1820’s.

You’ll notice the South has a lot of natural rivers. You’ll notice most of the ones up north are man-made.

The South did most of their trade shipping via river. The north had to build roads and canals and the majority of the money they used to pay for it wasn’t from Northern taxes. Before textiles took off in the North, the Sourh was far and away the most affluent part of the nation. The South was pissed long before abolition even became a remotely popular idea because they went from taxation without representation to taxation with representation that goes ignored.

There are also many small incidents, most of which, believe it or not, had shit to do with slavery, that encouraged anger amongst the Southerners. Small skirmishes between states, arguments over land that got out of control, etc. When you have a country as large as ours, where some of our states are larger than most European countries, it’s very easy to be a part of the same country but feel completely apart from the people 800+miles away from you, especially when your money is going to fund projects that you and yours will probably never even see, let alone use.

By the time Lincoln came into the picture and the abolition issue had become a completely toxic nightmare, the North vs. South mentality had long since been there and the country was a powder keg.

Lincoln’s election is what was the “final straw” for many of the states —- but not only because he was anti-Slavery (never make the mistake of believing this means he saw African Americans as equals. The man was as prejudice as they come. More on thag in a second). Lincoln also wanted to raise taxes and push for more and more government funded projects. When you’re making the most money, have the highest taxes, and see the least amount of public works…..yeah, you’d be pissed when this guy shows up, too.

And yes, in their mind, he also wanted to take their property. Totally twisted and wrong of them. But the other complaints are far and away legitimate and were the biggest cause of the war.

Most Southerner’s didn’t own slaves. They could not afford to. Just like most of us here can’t afford a maid. Because while you may not pay a slave, you have to feed and cloth them. And you have to buy them.

The extremely wealthy plantation owners had many, but they were not, despite what Gone With the Wind portrays, the majority, by any means.

Your average, well-to-do farmer (NOT plantation) may have had maybe one or two slaves but most didn’t even have that. Your average Southern family was lucky to feed themselves and do alright.

Those people weren’t fighting to keep slaves they didn’t have. They were fighting for, well and truly, States rights to be taxed fairly, to secede the union, to equal protection by government troops (again, so much more to the conflict leading to this), and so much more.

The Unuon wasn’t fighting to abolish slavery. They were fighting because as horrible as it sounds, they were losing their cash cow. Sure, they started using slavery as a rallying point to encourage men to join up, but you notice that Lincoln waited a loooong time to free the slaves. And if you go look at the actual historical documentation, he never intended to free them when he went into office. He preached slavery was wrong but never said he wanted to free slaves. He did it as a strategic move to get freed slaves to join up, as well as to seriously piss off and decrease morale amongst the South. It also lead to a shit load of olantstion uprisings which caused even trouble for the South. It also allowed the Union troops, as they conquered the South, to “liberate” newly made American Citizens — and recruit them to join up. Oh, and it didn’t abolish slavery in the Union (trust me, PLENTY of Yankees still had slaves because it was extremely common for the middle and upper classes to have a couple of house slaves) — only the Confederacy. So, again, how was this EVER about freeing slaves?

And if you read up on Lincoln, yeah, don’t believe the movies. The man flat out said he saw “negroes” as lesser, not as intelligent or capable, so on and so forth. He was progressive for this time which is ass backwards, idiotic, and bigotous in ours.

The point is, while, as a Yankee child, I was born and raised thinking the Union was Superman, pure and serving justice and goodness and everything American and the Southerners were Lex Luthor out to enslave the world, I’ve always been a history nut. First non-fiction book I ever read was Lincoln’s biography when I was 10. It was….sort of heart breaking to find out one of my heroes wasn’t even close to what I expected.

I’m not saying the South was right. But neither was the Union. And those Southerners saying it’s about State’s rights aren’t talking about slavery. Actually talk to them sometime, most of them, no matter how ignorant, will tell you a lot of what I just said I never learned any of that in a public school, even the ones I intended as a teenager in the South. I learned that through college and independent research.

Like I said, the winners write the history books. And our country always tried to paint itself in the best light possible.

Hell, most people don’t even know we dropped two bombs on Japan instead of one because it’s shameful. And they completely covered up the fact that Japan had issued a surrender before the second bomb was ever dropped. And don’t get me started on Japanese “interment camps” here in the US.

We as a nation have plenty of sins. The Union, Lincoln, and the things that were done TO those who lived in the South (seriously, those people got beyond screwed during the war) are no less sinful than the atrocities committed by those slave owning Southerners.

The Union tried to pain themselves as being on a holy crusade to free the dlaves to make their acts seem noble, but that was definitely a case of “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

All persons should be treated as equals. Slavery was a horrible, godawful blight in our country’s history, of which we have many. There is no excuse for what those people did and my intent is not to pardon them. Simply to shine a more realistic and unbiased light on history.

Slavery needed to be ended, and even if it was for all the wrong reasons, the Civil War helped end that abomination. I hate the concept of “the ends justify the means,” and I’m not sure they ever really do. But if it’s possible, I’d say the Civil War would be one if the poster children for the idea.

You discuss the south as “far and away the most affluent part of the nation”, but later say most Southerners could barely afford to eat. With those two contradicting points in mind your rant becomes muddled – when you refer to the “South” throughout the post, are you talking about the entire region or only the wealthy plantation owners?

Just coming in to point out that Lincoln didn’t delay freeing the slaves because he wanted to have the US profit from slavery; several slave states remained in the Union, and if Lincoln had freed the slaves right off the bat those would have defected to the confederacy.
The south also wasn’t economically propping up the North. The North was a larger economy than the south by a long shot – as evidenced by how the war turned out. Your argument on that is the intellectual descendant of Davis’ claim that the south leaving would ‘make grass grow on the streets of New York’.

Not saying that there were no people in the South victimized by the war, but South seceded because of a perceived threat to slavery (which I might add artificially inflated the number of their votes) and the North was motivated by preserving the United States and later ending slavery. It boils down to a caste of slave-owners who were actively subverting democracy attempting to seize the south for their own ends.

Your post, while highly informative and accurate, has cleverly used words like “part of” and “also” to obscure the fact that while there were certainly other issues going on, slavery was still a huge one, by all accounts. Even if plenty of southerners didn’t have slaves, that doesn’t mean they didn’t feel it was an important issue- that’s not how politics works. Especially when you consider who has the most sway in politics- those with money, who definitely did have slaves.

No one said war was great, or that there weren’t atrocities, or that the north were saints. Well, maybe idiots, but that’s self evident in saying shit like that. Sherman’s march to the sea was not pretty.

” the winners write the text books people. ” Actually for decades it was Southerners who were writing the textbooks, portraying John Brown as a madman (no one thought so at the time), and invoking state’s rights (when most of the secession documents cited slavery), and portraying Reconstruction as a bunch of profiteering parasites (and not a lot of people trying to teach blacks how to, say, read), or that Sherman’s march was an orgy of rape and murder when it wasn’t, and even much of the property destruction was scorched earth tactics by the Confederate forces.

“the South was far and away the most affluent part of the nation” When? 1800, maybe. 1860, no; the North had more people, pretty much all the immigrants, most of the railroads, and most of the industry. The South had cotton and tobacco.

” taxation with representation that goes ignored. ” And yet many Presidents had been from the South, the South got shit like the Fugitive Slave Law passed, they had equality in the Senate by deal, their representation in the House was unjustly boosted by 3/5 of the slave population…

“But the other complaints are far and away legitimate and were the biggest cause of the war.” Not according to them at the time.

“Most Southerner’s didn’t own slaves. They could not afford to. Just like most of us here can’t afford a maid.” Terrible analogy. Maids have gotten a lot more expensive since then: “I never thought I’d be rich enough to own a car or poor enough to not have servants.” — Angela Lansbury, I think.
Most Southerners didn’t own slaves because most of them were women or young men, not known for their ownership of expensive capital. Between a quarter and a third of Southern *families* owned slaves. Half of Confederate soldiers and pretty much all officers came from slaveowning families.

“Those people weren’t fighting to keep slaves they didn’t have.” Half of them were. The others could well have been fighting for the right to own slaves — aspirations, you know. The American Dream.

“They were fighting for, well and truly, States rights to be taxed fairly, to secede the union” How much taxes were people that poor paying?

“you notice that Lincoln waited a loooong time to free the slaves” Well, there is this small matter of the Constitution. People say the Emancipation Proclamation only banned slavery in the rebel states, which is true, but the President doesn’t have the power to change laws or seize property on his say-so, so the Proclamation couldn’t have been other than it was.

‘to “liberate” newly made American Citizens’ Why is liberate in quotes? That alone indicates you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.

“PLENTY of Yankees still had slaves because it was extremely common for the middle and upper classes to have a couple of house slaves” Uh, no. Slavery was illegal in most of the Union, remember? Exceptions were the border states, like Kentucky or Maryland or DC. Where slavery wasn’t that common to begin with.

Lots of Northern soldiers marched to war singing “John Brown’s Body”, which is an abolitionist hymn. Abolishing slavery wasn’t the starting issue for all the North, but it was for many. Sometimes because free labor didn’t want to compete with slave labor, but still.

“most people don’t even know we dropped two bombs on Japan instead of one” I’ve never met anyone who didn’t know that. Or who didn’t know about the internment camps.

“they completely covered up the fact that Japan had issued a surrender” No, they were still arguing about it even after Nagasaki. It took Hirohito’s intervention to get a surrender.

Not to mention completely posthumously destroying the image of Ulysses S. Grant, the last president to take a real stand for civil rights until the 60s. He gets unfairly labelled an alcoholic (in reality, he was a man who couldn’t hold his liquor in a culture of heavy drinking and as a result had to swear off the drink or get railroaded) and as some sort of kingpin of corruption (while he was actually just naive).

On a random note, my family were overseers on slave plantations, so I have no vested interest in vilifying the south. The South was just kind of an objectively terrible place at the time, and there’s no reason at all to display sympathy for the Confederacy any more than you display sympathy for non-Nazi WWII German soldiers. You feel bad that they had to die for such an unworthy cause, but you don’t vilify the people who killed them.

Matdredalia, you’re really overstating the differences in transportation. The north had more canals and railroads than the south, but the south did lots of canal and railroad building too — and wanted lots more, but didn’t have as much free capital to spend on the things. Most of those canals and railroads, north and south, were built with state or private money. The Whigs wanted to spend federal money on infrastructure, but the Democrats mostly blocked them from doing so. What money the Whigs did spend on infrastructure went more to the south and west than the north — that was the payoff for tariffs helping factories that were concentrated primarily in the northeast.

There were disputes other than slavery and race issues, yes — but none of them were north-south regional disputes. There were plenty of pro-tariff, pro-internal improvement people in the south, and plenty of opponents in the north. New Hampshire was much more anti-tariff than North Carolina during the Whig era, after all. Both parties were cross-sectional. Only when slavery became the primary issue did you get sectional parties.

So no, tariffs weren’t a meaningful factor in the war. That was a story put out by ex-Confederates (many of them former Whigs who used to vote for high tariffs themselves) in their memoirs in an effort to take attention off the slavery issue that they’d trumpeted in the 1850s and 60s.

Damnit. Reread that and I meant to clarify my comment about the Southerners being screwed being a sin akin to slavery — I’m not talking about the slave owning scum, those who fought to protect that crap or any of that.

I’m talking about the innocent children who were murdered, people who were pro-abolition but because of where they lived still had their houses raided, or even burnt down. The people who were raped, abused, and tortured because they were Confederates which meant they ceased to be human — the same way plantation owners saw dark skin and thus that meant African Americans weren’t people. I don’t believe that the suffering was as great or anything like that for it lasted for a far shorter period (well, at least the abuse, murder, and rape. Many Southerners lost their homes in the aftermath or were completely screwed out of land that was rightfully theirs and much more. Again, screw plantation owners. Referring to those people who just lived in the wrong place.

Ugh, anyways, my point was that those who hurt others for personal gain, twisted pleasure, or for basically any other reason than that which protects themselves or another (IE: don’t murder captives once they’re secured, etc.) is committing a sin still. That’s all.

Props for your meta-point: there are people who shouldn’t be hurt who are hurt in every war AND The Bad Guys don’t all always get what’s coming to them. AND accounts of sides and issues and processes ARE simplified in any account. Notwithstanding which slavery was so pivotal and venomous an issue for many opinion leaders and decision makers and ordinary folks too who led the way or went along with the war (willing or reluctant and stone ignorant about what it would be like), that there’s no way not to put slavery at the head of the list. Gotta start somewhere and I see no serious alternative to “In the beginning there was Slavery….”

There are liberals in Texas and conservatives in Massachussets, but both states are going to be judged by the political policies the majorities in them support. I have no idea if you are a fan of Ted Cruz and Louis Gohmert or you think they’re a couple of goobers, but I will judge Texas collectively based on what Texans collectively do.

You think missing a class is bad, my girlfriend in college skipped a whole Final once. She’d gotten the hour mixed up & missed it entirely.

She was close to inconsolable. We spent about two hours driving nowhere while she calmed herself down, then I bought her her first Pokemon game to take her mind off the mistake. (she still managed a C- iirc)

It has been said before, but the “I get straight A’s without even trying” song sounds awfully familiar. It is most often heard the final year of high school, and in the first month or two of freshman year. I don’t think I ever heard it after that.

There are a number of people who coast through high school and their first contact with grades in college is a shock and wake-up call. But there is still a group that coast through college because they can. It’s just a much smaller group. And then some of them hit grad-school.

I am conflicted here. On one hand, I feel that if Walky gets to coast through college he will get dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. OTOH, I guess that there is not much of a market for “Walky performs a study night and, for a first time, it is not too ineffective or aggressively boring”.

I’ll do you one better. I’m in medical school, and there are *still* a handful of people who can sit in the back of the room (or not come), seem to never study, and still blow every exam out of the water. I think that group never disappears at any level, it just gets progressively smaller.

“Lisa Simpson” is right! Next, if Walky doesn’t succeed in calming her, she may start raving at the sky “I’VE FAIIILLLLED YOU, GEORGE WASHINGTON!”

But, I’m pretty sure, the Farce has only begun…..How will Dorothy handle this totally alien slice of reality completely unlike anything from her K-12 years? Will she simply focus on catch-up from what ever her GPA might lose from this failed attendance, or…….

Perhaps I am a Texan who may or may not own legally purchased semi automatic firearms and who may/may not have strong opinions on the current abortion debate and who may/may not support the current administration and who may/may not have strongly felt spiritual tenants….

The point is the amount of criticism and judgment seen in this…the forum of a comic strip is rather sad.
Is there truth in the saying.. ‘I believe in tolerance…but only if you support my side of the argument?’

Perhaps Im acceptable as a Texan only if I support your positions…otherwise Im like the rest of the ‘delusional lot’ as one of you so nicely put it.

I guess this is why, by in large, Texans don’t pay mind to what others think, for its really mostly shrill and accusatory.

I get really irritated at people who try to swing the tolerance argument around to justify perspectives that are themselves intolerant.

Tolerance is about letting the other side have their say. It’s about not restricting someone’s lifestyle because you have some nebulous philosophical disagreement with them. It’s about not beating someone unconcious because they happen to be gay, or denying them access to their partner in the hospital. It’s about letting people live their lives with fair access to education and medical care regardless of their racial or religious background.

It is NOT about anybody anywhere getting to say anything they want without criticism.

If Texans want tolerance, last I checked they’re totally allowed to say anything they want about any group or issue. They have full access to the services and freedoms being an american allows them to have, and their rights are being respected. They have the right to say that they think homosexuality is an abomination, as long as they don’t infringe on the rights and freedoms of gay citizens. They have the right to say they think abortion is wrong, or that everybody can own whatever guns they want, etc, etc, provided that they, like everyone else, abide by the law o the land at the end of the day, as agreed upon by us as a nation, because that is the social contract we agree to when we accept the benefits of modern society.

That does not mean that they are exempt from my right to say that Texas, as a state-wide community, has elected some of the most corrupt, backward thinking, irrational, delusional, piss-pots in the history of politics to run their country, or that I can’t say that anybody that voted for Rick Perry will never be subject to my respect or admiration. I think the man is a dispicable hypocrite, and I think the same of anyone who agrees with him on the majority of issues. I think he has mangled the Texas educational infrastructure, and he, and school board members that have been elected by the people in that state have crippled the intellectual development of the state’s youth.

I’m not saying this is true of all Texans, but the ones that it is true of have earned my profound disdain.

But for all of that, they still get the same rights as anybody else. Despite the fact that I think they’re abhorrent examples of human beings, they still get to do all of the same things the rest of us do. I’ll never argue that they can’t marry who they want, or worship who they want, so long as their freedoms don’t infringe on anybody else’s rights. That’s what tolerance is about.

Hi fellow Texan. Replying a few days late on this one. Maybe you’ll see it anyway.

“The point is the amount of criticism and judgment seen in this…the forum of a comic strip is rather sad.”

Uh-huh. Sad how? This comic has touched on subjects of date rape, homosexuality, emotional abuse, racism, religious intolerance, all manner of politics and a plethora of other subjects. Forgive my rudeness but…what were you expecting? That the audience would not discuss these topics themselves? That the readers of the comic would not have an interest in these topics, and that their opinions might not be strongly held ones? If so, your surprise is what makes *me* sad.

“Is there truth in the saying.. ‘I believe in tolerance…but only if you support my side of the argument?’ ”

As I said, I am from Texas. I’ve been in enough political debates and arguments to know how nasty, abrasive, and aggressive Texas Republicans are these days. I don’t ever recall them being this close minded, hateful, or cultish as little as a decade ago. As someone in the minority, I’m quite sick of it. If I get passionate about the subject, it is because my fellow Texans have pushed me into a corner and brought out the monster in me. My beliefs have been forged as much by their zeal as anything else, and I’m not going to shy away from a discussion of them for anyone. You are free to read the comic and avoid the comments if that is upsetting to you. Otherwise, I would hope you could follow your own observations and try to be tolerant of viewpoints that do not agree with your own. People are frustrated and hurt by what Texas politicians say and do and the laws they enact. They have a right to be, and a right to say so, and this community is as valid a place to say so as any. You can disagree, you can counter the arguments, etc but I see no reason for anyone here to stay silent on the topic just because it might upset a few Texans here and there.

“Perhaps Im acceptable as a Texan only if I support your positions…otherwise Im like the rest of the ‘delusional lot’ as one of you so nicely put it.”

Texas is a big place, no doubt. But realize the folks we tend to elect have said some very stupid and/or some very shitty things over the years. And they get to say them loudly and often because we give them the voice to do it over and over. When Rick Perry suggests we secede from the Union, people are right to roll their eyes and sigh. When some bigot says homosexuals don’t deserve the same basic rights as the rest of us, people are right to be offended (and in the Texas of some of my best homosexual friends who also live in the state- hurt and ostracized by their own state government). If we as Texans aren’t out there actively trying to refute those sterotypes by word and deed I feel our silence is approving of the message by default. I happen to find the message being sent repugnant and try to work against it. Do we all deserve to be condemned for the actions of a few? No, probably not. But if you aren’t doing anything to stop it from happening, you have to expect the criticism to continue.

As for the people actively spreading these messages? I DON’T find them worth respecting or acceptable, and I don’t feel a need to hide that. The laws these people are legislating, the messages they are spreading- they show no tolerance for those who disagree with them, and they shall receive none in turn.

“I guess this is why, by in large, Texans don’t pay mind to what others think, for its really mostly shrill and accusatory.”

Texas politicians, like the worst elements in the Republican Party, make a living by being as narrow-minded and outrageous in their statements and policies as they can be. They seek to invoke outrage, because outrage equals attention. People who are outraged tend to be shrill and accusatory. So, consider it a success of the policies of the people we voted into office, friend. Covering our ears and pretending the concerns of the rest of the country (and a growing voice within our own state) do not exist and do not matter changes nothing and only MAKES. THE. PROBLEM. WORSE.

I too have seen history texts that say the civil war was more about state’s rights than just slavery as a single issue. I’m sure there’s a little bit of truth to that, but let’s be honest too, slavery was the main state’s right that people were worried about. The south started to leave the union immediately upon Lincoln’s election, we’ll never know if their fear of him would have been justified had they stuck it out through his presidency.

It’s not just that slavery was the main “states’ rights” issue for the secessionists — I’ve been asking for years, and I have yet to get ANYONE to identify a single example of the federal government encroaching on the rights assigned to the states in the Consitution, or meddle in the internal affairs of the states, in a way that triggered southern protests. I have found a few federal encroachments on the internal activities of northern states, but that’s a topic for another thread.

No one has ever coherently answered the simple question “what SPECIFIC states’ rights were being violated?” in all the years I’ve been asking.

I get your point, however in this case I believe the Tenth Amendment may have been at issue:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”

In this case, I would argue that there is no “specific” rights assigned to states in the constitution, but rather the provision that EVERYTHING is a states right issue unless specifically addressed by the Constitution as a Federal issue.

On that note, Slavery was a States right issue in that the South at the time did not feel that the Federal Government had the Constitutional right to regulate or limit said practice. It was therefore…along with everything else…a matter for states to decide.

I hope this might answer your question on why nobody can provide specifics…..the only specifics that needed detailing are what is NOT a state right.

Except for those defined federal powers, by default, everything else is left to the states.

So we’re back to the Civil War being about slavery. No one would have seceded over “states’ rights”; they seceded, *before Lincoln even took office*, because an anti-slavery Republican had won the Presidency.

Maybe Walky is a “genius” and Dororthy is not and this can be a set up for some future conflict?

(I do not believe in geniuses who know things without learning about them, just from IQ – that’s cartoon logic – but maybe the Walky households had a lot of advanced books and reading and Walky absorbed them (for fun and because of strict parents) in his youth without noticing, and now he can fly without having to try hard most of the time?)